Elizabeth's Refuge
by timunderwood9
Summary: SAMPLE TILL 2021: Elizabeth thought she had killed her employer, the Earl of Lachglass, while defending herself from his vile advances. There was only one man in London to whom she could safely flee. The man whose proposal she had refused years before. When Elizabeth is reunited with Mr. Darcy, their love blossoms. But the Earl of Lachglass survived, and he wants revenge...
1. Chapter 1

The delicate blue and white decorative Chinese vase splintered into shards as Elizabeth Bennet smashed it over Lord Lachglass's head.

He collapsed to the ground, like a dropped sack of manure.

Elizabeth panted desperately as she stared him. Her heart raced with pain and fear.

What now?

Half a minute earlier, when Elizabeth's employer, the Earl of Lachglass, hurled her through the ornate doorway into his bedroom, the terror she'd felt dissolved as she stumbled painfully into the heavy oak of his bed frame.

Her sudden calmness had surprised Elizabeth greatly.

She would fight, she determined. She would fight, whether she lost or won. She would fight whether he killed her or not, and she would fight whether he succeeded in his aim or not. She would fight Lachglass with everything in her being.

Elizabeth had only been in the employ of Lord Lachglass for three months. He was a handsome man of an average height and age, with a modest paunch and cruel thick lips.

Her meetings with him had been infrequent. He had only once sat with them for a quarter of an hour to observe how his daughter's studies progressed with her. Lord Lachglass was a widower with one unwanted and generally uncared for daughter. This daughter was an unpleasant and spoiled child, and mostly unremarkable.

After Papa's death, Elizabeth had lived as a dependent on her uncle Mr. Gardiner's generosity, until reverses suffered during the economic crisis following the most recent peace with the French obliged her uncle to dismiss half the servants and take lodgers at his own house. It became preferable that the number of gentlewomen dependents upon his now slender income be reduced as far as possible.

Had the Earl interviewed her in person for the position as governess, rather than his kindly and ineffectual old housekeeper, Elizabeth would have known to refuse the offer of employment immediately, good as the wages were.

Mr. Blight, Lord Lachglass's man of business, had sat in the room with Mrs. Peterson. His manners should have provided warning enough to Elizabeth of what sort of a house she was agreeing to enter.

Mr. Blight was a thin, short man with a wicked scar across his cheek that he claimed had been received in service in a war, leering eyes that watched her uncomfortably close, and a greasy goatee he stroked endlessly.

During the course of the interview Mr. Blight had not spoken once. But his eyes. It surprised Elizabeth not at all to learn all of the servants lived in terror of him.

After he had thrown her into the room, Lord Lachglass followed Elizabeth into his bedroom on softly stalking shoes that made barely a sound on the thick fur rugs. Wildly, a phrase from _Macbeth_ crossed Elizabeth's mind, "With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design he moves like a ghost."

Lord Lachglass laughed as he shut the door behind him. "I've waited for this," he said with a leering smirk on his sensual lips, spreading his arms out wide so he might grab her if she ran towards the door. "At last, just us, Miss Bennet."

The way he used her name made Elizabeth's skin crawl, as if his voice slimed "Bennet" with rot.

No point in screaming. When Elizabeth returned from her half day holiday, she found all the other servants gone from the house, and soon as she entered, Mr. Blight grabbed her arm, pulled her up the stairs, and explained the master wished a special interview with her.

She had been brought up to the sitting room between the master's suite and the empty mistress's suite, and Mr. Blight stepped out of the room as soon as she entered it. Behind her she heard the click of the door locking.

The room felt too warm, stuffy, and hazy, as though it were filled with smoke from the fire.

Lord Lachglass demanded she disrobe, and slapped her when she refused and attempted to leave, despite knowing it was pointless to leave the room by the door.

Elizabeth's heart raced thumpingly in her chest as Lord Lachglass stepped towards her in the bedroom. Her heart beat so fast it nearly exploded with each pattering painful beat. The hair on the back of her arms and neck stood straight. She trembled. Part of her wanted to freeze and let the Earl do whatever he wished to her body, while she stared at the wall or ceiling silently begging the world for it to be over.

But there was a voice in her mind.

It was the voice of Elizabeth's best self. It combined the sound of Jane's voice, her long dead father's voice, and the voice of her uncle, Mr. Gardiner. This voice told her to pretend to be helpless and entirely under control of the fear, and to be ready to strike like a cobra when the moment came.

As a child many years before, Elizabeth pestered a professional pugilist who gave lessons on the noble art of bare fisticuffs to the interested gentlemen of the neighborhood to teach her something as well.

The muscled pugilist refused at first, and in the end he did refuse to teach her how to _properly _box. Instead he at last observed that even though she was a gentlewoman, gentlemen sometimes didn't notice such things when they decided to become handsy, and it was best she know how to crush a man's unmentionables and knock him silly, just like he'd taught both his nieces.

Elizabeth had since never thought upon those lessons more than once or twice with a laugh.

She had always deep down seen herself, despite the death of her father and her precipitous decline in consequence over the past five years, as a fortunate creature who could expect matters in life to turn out generally for the best if she put forward a fair effort and waited patiently for her work to bear some fruit.

Really bad things, such as being the victim of a serious attempt by a titled gentleman to ravish and rape his governess, occurred mostly in novels and the fictive stories worried women passed amongst themselves.

She had always seen the chance of such a thing happening to her in actual, vivid life as a matter so remote as to not be worth worrying about.

The moment was surreal, almost dreamlike. This unreality allowed Elizabeth, despite the grip of adrenaline and the sweat gathering in her armpits, to wait patiently to strike the earl at the first moment she thought his guard was let down.

Movements that had been practiced to perfection for a few days with that pugilist flickered half remembered through her brain.

The earl laughed as he shut the door behind him. His piercing, handsome, evil blue eyes looked through her. The sneer was one of command.

He'd already slapped a purpling bruise onto her face. But Elizabeth could not feel any pain.

Elizabeth pulled her elbows tighter against herself, in a way that made her feel helpless. She trembled, and made a pretense of looking every direction. The fireplace was next across from the bed, with red embers glowing. Iron poker and scoop. A Chinese style vase with delicate blue veins and accents sat on the marble ledge above the fire, glowing in thin light through the windows. There was a vivid painting of a naked woman with impossibly large breasts sitting atop the waist of an unrobed gentleman, her eyes rolled back in ecstasy as he grabbed her hips.

Her mouth was dry.

Silk hangings surrounded the bed, with its dense pillowed red silk coverlets.

An absent part of Elizabeth's brain thought this was all very cliché for a rake's den.

Lachglass leered at her, smiling softly, making his thick lips thicker, and his paunch a bit more prominent. He stepped forward to grab her arms. He squeezed them so tight they hurt. In the moment that he grabbed her, Elizabeth realized she could not drive her knee into his crotch. The angle was wrong, and he was seemingly tensed and ready for her to do that.

The head.

The pugilist's voice snapped through her mind, in what was a long speech that seemed to take just an instant for her to relive. She felt again the warm summer breeze on her face, the scent of freshly mown hay, the callused hands of the pugilist, the coltish feel of her long legs and arms that the rest of her body had not grown into. The slow speaking voice of the pugilist, as he paused with every few words to make sure she had heard, and the way he repeated himself.

"The head. That skull bone. Thick it is." He had made her nod. "The skull is thick. You can bang a fellow up neatly if you hit a soft spot with it. The skull. There is power in the neck. Crack it forward, and you can break a man's nose, or jaw. Just don't hit him on _his _skull. 'Cause it's hard, the skull is. Hit them with your hard parts on their squishy parts."

Lachglass laughingly pulled her towards him, planning to force his gross mouth against her.

_Crack_.

A loud crack, and a soft crumpling sound as the nose collapsed.

Elizabeth's eyes swam as the top of her head cracked against the earl's face. He released her arms with an inarticulate moan of pain.

Now grabbing his shoulders for leverage, Elizabeth kneed his groin.

He _oof_ed again, his eyes went wide in pain and then started to water as blood flowed freely from his nose.

Elizabeth stepped back away from the earl. Her eyes flickered to the door.

With an inarticulate grunt, Lachglass snarled at her, and unevenly spread one arm to catch her if she ran past him, as he continued to grotesquely grip his wounded groin with the other.

Her heart pounded. The outside door was still locked. She could run past him.

Elizabeth turned towards the mantelpiece, but because she was frightened in that instant that it would take too long to grab and draw the poker from out of the iron holding rack, she grabbed the out-of-placedly pretty vase from the mantelpiece with one hand. It was heavier than the delicate blue tracery made it look.

Lord Lachglass stumbled towards her.

Driven by all her terror and all her determination to not lose to this horrible creature, she brought it down on his head.

Amidst shards of shattered fine china, Lachglass dropped like a sack of manure.

Elizabeth's eyes swam. She could not see anything. She panted hard. He wasn't moving. She was dizzy.

Not moving at all.

What now?

A new fear took her, and Elizabeth knelt down to the earl's body. She couldn't see him breathing. There was no sound of air moving in and out, his chest was still.

Elizabeth tremblingly moved her hand to hold over his still mouth, to feel if there was any breath.

A hard knock on the bedroom door startled her up.

"Milord, Milord, are you well?" Mr. Blight's nasal voice called out.

Lachglass's still and silent body made no reply.

They'd hang her for this.

And Elizabeth had no liking for the notion of being hung.

She had to escape. Now. The apartment suite door must be unlocked again if Mr. Blight was at the bedroom door.

Elizabeth silently stepped on the balls of her feet next to the door. Mr. Blight cautiously opened the door, saying, "Milord, apologies, sir," again as he did so. And as the gentleman's gentleman blinked at the earl's still body, Elizabeth struck him in the jaw, just below an ugly scar on his face, with a hurled elbow, the force in it gained by twisting her body as hard and fast as she could. She'd kept her palm open, as taught, so that the bones in her arm pounded into him. The sharp point of the elbow gashed open his skin.

The pugilist had told her that if she was ever in any serious danger, she must hit far harder than she even thought she could. She could not leave any shred of muscle power unused if she wished to protect herself. And he'd taught her that the elbow was a vastly better weapon than her soft and easily breakable hands.

Elizabeth ran past Mr. Blight, not giving him a chance to recover, and she didn't want to attack him with another weapon and kill a second man. The door was open, as she'd hoped, and she ran through it, and stumbling, hurled herself down the stairs.

She tripped at the bottom and fell down the last four steps, but though she thought her foot should have been twisted from the fall, she peculiarly felt no pain.

And then she was up, to the main door. Thrown open. The world seemed to appear in moments caught in portraiture or pencil sketches rather than as a smooth reality.

She ran.

The earl's house was on a fashionable square, with an oval gated park in the middle surrounded by quiet cobblestoned streets shaded by tall elms and oaks. The buildings were made of a handsome grey and brown stone. The day had a grey sleety February sky. Elizabeth did not pause as she dashed out the house and down the staircase to the building's entrance. She took the first street that turned away from the garden in the middle of the square.

Elizabeth ran.

Mr. Blight would recover, and come after her with anger and blood.

And she ran from the dead sack of manure of a body she'd left behind in the room. Elizabeth took another turn, at random, except she was confident this alleyway kept her running _away _from the house. Then yet another turn. She barely had a sense of where she was.

Without meaning to she hit a major road. Bond Street, emptier than in summer, but still full of carriages, and fashionable ladies and gentlemen strolling up and down and stopping in the expensive shops.

Tall white plastered buildings, and handsome red brick façades on either side.

She must appear so strange. The people she saw from the corners of her eyes stared at her. She full of fright ran across the road, without properly looking to both sides, or waiting.

A careening carriage carrying two ladies gripping their ostrich feather hats tightly to keep them from flying away, and a laughing gentleman in a beaver hat missed her by bare inches. The extra thrill of coming close to death only made her run faster once more.

Elizabeth had always been athletic, and she liked to run when she was in a park and not observed, but it had been years since she had run very much. In the cold air her lungs ached. They felt like they would collapse. They hurt so much, but she was still terrified, and she needed to get as far from the house as possible. As far away. Just get away.

Her legs were rubbery and they wanted to give up with every hurtling step.

She ran.

She ran down a thin street lined on both sides with handsome buildings, and reached Grosvenor square, with its tall palatial buildings and townhouses, and the large garden square with many benches. She ran past the fronts of the expensive houses, a blue streak conscious of the curious who may be observing her. Her footsteps were strangely soft for how fast she ran, as she was wearing house slippers instead of proper boots.

Out of the square.

Her chest ached hideously with each and every gasping difficult breath.

Elizabeth's brain still dwelled on the sensation as the vase cracked over his head, splintering and leaving the top in her hands, pieces turning around in her palms and nearly cutting her. The thud of his body hitting the ground. Blood from his crumpled nose and head. So much blood.

Elizabeth burst into a giant park.

Gravel pathways and tree-lined boulevards were almost empty due to the cold of the day. A thin frozen drizzle wisped from the skies. In shady spots under grey, denuded trees patches of snow remained from a snowfall a week before. The cold sweat stuck to Elizabeth's body and dress.

Despite its dourness, nature, even nature trimmed to its best effect, was to Elizabeth an old, comforting friend.

Gasping breaths.

Elizabeth collapsed onto a wrought iron bench hidden by two trees overlooking the Serpentine lake in the middle of Hyde Park, where royal swans swam, and where in December the pregnant wife of Byron's atheist friend Percy Shelley, abandoned by her new lover, had thrown herself in the lake and been found water logged and very dead the next day.

Her lungs ached.

Her fingers tingled. Her legs shook and screamed with pain. The twisted foot, after supporting her for the entire run, ached deep inside.

Elizabeth was cold.

Drizzles of rain mixed with ice and the occasional flurry of snow attacked her. The frozen water melted instantly on the ground or her soaked through cotton dress.

The light crinkling sound of a breaking vase. The vase striking his head. Was that crack she now clearly remembered his head breaking, or the ceramic of the vase breaking?

The earl's mobile, lively, self-indulgent face. Still and bloody.

Elizabeth vomited, leaving acid and food on the brown winter ground. Her vomit steamed in the cold for a moment. Her throat burned. She looked around her sightlessly.

Still seeing the still earl. Still trying to know if she had killed him.

She probably had.

The pugilist master that had told her how easy it was to accidentally kill a man with a blow to the head.

She'd had no choice.

Her head was sore. Elizabeth touched for a moment the top of her unbonneted hair, and flinched her hand away. The top of her head felt bruised and sore where she had struck his face. This brought a smirk to her face for a moment. If her forehead hurt this much, he would hurt far more.

Except he couldn't.

Elizabeth forced herself to stand.

Cold grey sleety day. She had neither coat, nor gloves, nor boots. Her indoor slippers had been mutilated by her run. No purse, no reticule, no money, no anything that would do as a substitute. The day was not cold enough that she would freeze to death — perhaps not even after night fell — but she was miserably cold and shivering.

Elizabeth could barely stand. The injured foot twisted under her, and the other leg felt rubbery and shook under the weight of her body.

Elizabeth collapsed back onto the weathered wooden slats of the bench.

She closed her eyes, and tears started to prickle in her eyes. She should just sit here for a while.

Too cold to sit still; too hurt to move.

She would go numb and stiff if she stayed long. Bizarrely, given the weather, she and her dress had become soaked in sweat during her run, and she smelled like an untidy barn now.

The Gardiners. They were a long walk away, and she needed to start now.

A few overcoated walkers took advantage of the beauty of the park, giving her strange glances from across their sideburns.

Less than a mile to the south-east was St. James's Park, with the Queen's House in the old Buckingham House on one side of the park, and St. James's Palace on the other side. To the south of that were the houses of parliament, and to the east were the slums around Convent Garden, and past that the old city of London, with Gracechurch Street right in the center, a few hundred feet from the Thames and the old London Bridge.

She would walk there as fast as she could. Perhaps it was already too late, but she thought if she hurried to Gracechurch Street she would be able to get there before anyone raised a proper alarm and soldiers or Bow Street Runners were directed by the servants and Mr. Blight to wait for her at her aunt and uncle's house. She would be able to gain from them some ready cash, a coat, and some food before she had to figure out how to disappear from the chase that would seek to find and hang the murderer of an earl.

Elizabeth stood once again on her unsteady feet.

She would not be able to walk the entire distance this way, but a branch on one of the overhanging oaks was thin enough for her to snap off in the cold that made the branch brittle and dry.

Elizabeth hobbled to the tree, and gripped her chosen staff.

It was illegal she knew, to disturb the trees in a royal park, trespassing, a crime, a fine and perhaps a period of jail. The value of the tree branch was certainly far below the hanging sum.

She tried to pull the branch off the tree with a thin little laugh. Better to laugh. Assault, murder, and _wanton and premeditated_ _destruction of a tree_. They'd have plenty of reason to punish her when they caught her.

The branch bent, but did not snap off.

The tree was still too healthy for a clean crack. Pulling it put pressure on her now swelling ankle, and the stab of pain made her close her eyes and breathe shallowly.

She needed this stick.

Elizabeth gripped the branch firmly, one hand next to where she'd already created a bend, and the other halfway down to the tapering, bare end.

She started twisting the branch around and around, though her ungloved hands squealed in pain at the rough grip on the bark.

Each time around more of the fiber holding the wood to the tree stretched and then snapped, and then the branch twisted around and around easily, with just a strand holding the tree together, and patiently, knowing that in such tasks a hurry always made things worse, Elizabeth twisted and twisted till it came free.

Elizabeth's hands were now scraped, though not bleeding, and they smelled of the tree's juices and sap.

The stick also was not a steady cane, it bent and shivered under her weight, but it was better than nothing. Elizabeth carefully hobbled towards the fashionable houses of the British monarchs, trying to not put too much weight either on her injured foot or on her makeshift cane.

One step after another. One after another.

When she reached the streets between the houses, she gratefully used her other arm to support herself on the gates and building walls as she stumbled forward. She faced a lengthy walk, a full three miles, straight across the city. Elizabeth's frozen hobbling pace was slow, and exquisitely painful. At one time the sky burst into a full rain, soaking her till her underclothes clung around her, entirely immodestly.

She really, really wished she'd chosen to run from the Lachglass House in the opposite direction, _towards _her uncle instead of away from him.

The freezing wind blew through her. She was colder by far than she had ever been before. Step after step.

When she went through the slums around Convent Gardens, the men there sneered at her, and one grabbed her arm, before he saw the bruises on her face and decided to go elsewhere. Perhaps it was something in her eyes. She had been prepared to strike him with her head or to twist her body to hit him with her elbow that had also purpled with bruises.

It would be a silly irony if she killed an earl to protect her virtue, and then was raped by a beggar or a common ruffian. But the prospect did not scare her. She was always told to be frightened of this part of the city, and to never, ever wander there, ideally not even with footmen to protect her.

Despite her hobbling weakness, she had killed one more man than most of the unwashed ruffians who ganged in this poor area.

As she walked Elizabeth used the walls or fences that she passed for additional support beyond that provided by her impromptu staff. It took three hours for her to hobble the three miles. She knew that after it had taken so much time her hope that it would be safe for her to ask her relatives for help before running again was no longer sound.

Whatever authorities would be sent out to apprehend her could have easily been already dispatched.

She refused to think about that, and by now Elizabeth was so cold and so sore that she began not to have a care if they hung her in the morning, so long as they gave her a hot drink and let her sleep in front of a nice fire tonight.

Finally.

At last, as it was becoming dark, Elizabeth shiveringly reached Leadenhall market, where beneath sodden tents a few remaining desultory butchers and greengrocers hawked their wares to the last late evening shoppers, mostly the poorer sort, clerks or workmen for the banks and merchants who clustered in this area. The wealthier sort sent their servants early in the morning to get the freshest of the foods and meats from the markets. Her aunt and uncle still did so, as despite the reversals in fortune they had faced since the collapse of prices following the victory at Waterloo, they could easily afford two or three servants, and they still owned outright the house in which they lived.

Across the street from her, safety.

The three story house the Gardiners lived in sat on the opposite side of the street from the market. The attic and half the rooms were now rented out to lodgers, one of them Mr. Gardiner's clerk, and all of them employed in business here in the city.

A cheery light burned from the windows, and from half behind a banked pile of coals that a street vendor roasted chestnuts on, Elizabeth watched. Something stiff and sore in her kept her from crying out in greeting, as her uncle strode up the street, his beaver top hat keeping _his _head and ears warm.

The door opened, he smiled at someone within, and the door quickly closed.

Elizabeth closed her eyes and breathed deeply several times.

Safe and home.

The pursuit could not yet have arrived at the Gardiners, as Mr. Gardiner would have been called from his warehouses to see to the matter if it had, rather than walking home calmly at the end of the business day. And there would have been _something _less domestic in how he was greeted if the house was on fire with the news that she'd murdered an earl.

Elizabeth put a hand on a cold lamp post. The weather was freezing, and getting colder by the minute as evening fell. Time to be warm at last.

And then, just as Elizabeth was about to start across the street, a hackney cab, driven at the unsafe, hurtling pace that all cab drivers used, pulled up in front of the Gardiners' house.

Two men stepped out.

One a uniformed constable from the parish association funded to protect the rich district that Lachglass lived in. The other's face was wrapped up in bandages, Elizabeth could easily recognize him from his size and posture as Mr. Blight, the earl's man of business.

They walked up to the door and pounded for entry.

Elizabeth hurried away, back the direction she had come. And then she went south, to the waterfront of the Thames.

She reached the waterfront near the flat top of the old London Bridge. Old people still talked about how the bridge used to be packed four stories tall with houses. Boats with lamps swinging side to side floated up and down the river, barely visible in the dim foggy evening. In the distance the last reddish hints of sunlight faded by the second. The eternal bustle of commerce, barges, stevedores, cats, dogs, and all manner of people and creatures continued doing their business along the dockside at night.

There was a barrel with a fire burning in it for warmth that dockworkers taking a break and chewing tobacco gathered around. Elizabeth cautiously stood next to them, warming her hands.

"Eh, lady! Watcha doin out so late in that dress with no coat? Sick you'll be."

"Apologies." Elizabeth shivered and flinched away from the barrel and the workmen. The man looked after her with a head-shaking frown as she fled along the riverfront away from him.

Cold wind blew off the river, freezing Elizabeth's face.

She was alone, helpless.

There was nowhere she could go in London. No one she could turn to. Anyone who she stood upon close enough terms with that they would give her shelter without any money, was someone whose connection to her would be easily discovered by the investigators.

And even if a friend hid her, their servants would talk, and turn her in for a reward. There would certainly be a great reward. She had, after all, killed an earl.

She would freeze to death, in the wet and cold.

Was there anyone she could trust to help her at this time?

The name of one gentleman crossed her mind. He had been named as the inhabitant of a particular house on a square a few blocks from Lachglass's house. She had been told that this man was present in the town after the spectacular society marriage of his sister a few weeks ago by a gossiping footman while Elizabeth walked her ward around the streets.

It was a slender hope.

But this man whose name occurred to her had once, in a more fortunate time for her, many years before, told Elizabeth with dark passionate eyes that he ardently admired and loved her. And then she refused his suit out of misplaced spite and misapprehensions.

Wind blew through Elizabeth's dress, and a proper soaking rain now entertained her. Elizabeth started back towards where she had started, going towards the scene of her crime once more. The night was full of cold sleety rains, caught halfway between hail and plain rain, with little flutters of snowflakes melting in the lamplight.

One step after another. That was all it would take. One step after another.

Elizabeth wanted to lie down and cry, and let darkness take her. Her stomach hurt with hunger, and her foot ached and twinged with every step.

But Elizabeth kept walking.

**So here's the start of my newest book. Unfortunately I can't post the whole thing here currently because of the Kindle Unlimited rules, which demand Amazon exclusivity to put it in there - but if you are a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, or buy books on Amazon, go for it, and read the book right now. It's also going to be on sale for a dollar cheaper than its normal price until Sunday morning (which is Saturday night in the US, I live in Europe).**

**Otherwise follow the story, so you get updated when I start posting it here, probably around the start of 2021. There will be one more sample chapter which I will post Saturday.**


	2. Chapter 2

The moment Darcy entered the door to his finely appointed townhouse, his housekeeper Mrs. North greeted him in an unusual agitation. She flapped her hands and tugged at her bracelet. "Sir, sir, I've been waiting for you to return for the past hour. A strange gentlewoman is asking after you."

Darcy blinked. "A strange gentlewoman? Did she leave her card?"

"In the drawing room. Told her to wait for you. Couldn't send her off. Not in the cold. Not at all. I gave her a toddy, and told her to just sit there and keep warm. It's all so irregular. I think she is in some trouble, but a very sweet and good natured young gentlewoman. I can tell, you know. I can tell. Someone did wrong by her."

With a small smile Darcy shook his head. "Mrs. North, this is most unlike you. I can hardly make out the direction of your communication. Who is the woman seated in my drawing room who saw fit to call at," Darcy frowned in thought, "ten o'clock in the evening, since you said she has been waiting for me for an hour now. This is most irregular."

The thought crossed his mind that the entire situation might be some bizarre attempt to entrap him in marriage by entangling his reputation with that of the strange girl who had called. But that made no more sense to him than anything else that Mrs. North had said. Besides now that Georgiana was happily married to Mr. Tillman, Darcy had rather less reason to concern himself with the possibility of scandal.

"Um. Yes. Um. Let me explain." Mrs. North's head bobbed up and down as she stammered. "Nothing like this ever happened before. But I am sure she is a good sort, even though I don't know her. I'm worried she'll be quite sick from all that cold, walking around all day she said, in just a thin dress — no coat. It's been raining all day, off and on, and with that wind. She'll be fortunate if she doesn't catch her death of the cold."

"I begin to think that I will need to see this woman myself to gain any sense of the matter."

"Yes sir, that is likely best. I am sure the matter is not her fault, but I expect someone imposed on her. Miss Bennet's face is bruised. And her forehead and arms too, I dare say that—"

"Miss Bennet!" Darcy exclaimed, all hint of sleepiness and amusement at the situation suddenly gone. "Miss Elizabeth Bennet?"

"She did not say her Christian name, but—"

"Around this height, dimpled cheeks, and eyes which are roughly the color of the Thames at twilight—"

"No smiles to see any dimples on the girl tonight." Mrs. North tilted her head and smiled a little. "But her eyes are like that."

"Good God." Deep breath. And then Darcy took another deep breath. "I shall speak to her."

Perhaps it was one of her sisters.

Perhaps it was a completely unrelated Miss Bennet.

In the brief moment before he entered his drawing room Darcy wondered why Elizabeth would reenter his life at such a time. When he had finally entirely put that old affection behind him, and he at last was seriously looking for a prospect for wife, since he had reached the age when a man ought to marry if he had not already.

Besides he thought he would be decidedly lonely in a few weeks with Georgiana gone to her husband's estate in the north, and General Fitzwilliam soon to return to the division he commanded in the occupying army in France.

Darcy stepped briskly into the room.

She was Elizabeth.

His heart leapt in his chest and pattered fast.

Elizabeth clutched a blanket around her next to the fire and she seemed to not realize he was there. A small house kitten from the kitchen had climbed into her lap and was pushing its paws into her leg again and again, while she absently petted him and stared into the fire.

Her hair hung loosely around her ears and eyes, and she looked small and young, as if she had not aged a day in the four years since she refused his request for marriage. His heart went out to her, wanting to protect and comfort her. She looked like a wrung out rat, and she looked beautiful.

And then she looked at him, and as Mrs. North had said, her forehead had a big bruise, black and blue. And there was another softer bruise, shaped like a handprint, on her face.

Elizabeth.

What happened to you?

She stood up, the cat in her lap squealing as she absently put it on the arm of her chair.

"Mr. Darcy!"

He bowed. Darcy tried to speak but his voice would not come.

She was beautiful.

She shivered despite the warmth of the well heated room. And she was so bruised.

"What happened?" He forced himself to speak slowly and quietly, as though he was trying to comfort an injured and skittish horse.

But Darcy felt a roar of rage that screamed behind his ears. He added when she swallowed before answering, "Elizabeth, I am glad you came to me in whatever trouble you have found yourself."

"I was…" Something flashed in her eyes, and she did not speak for a moment.

"You need not speak," Darcy said, with the terror that she had been assaulted and defiled by some vicious man, "not if it is painful for you to recall. I trust you. Inform me how I might aid you."

"No, I must tell you. You may not wish to help me when you understand."

"I shall always wish to help you."

Elizabeth smiled humorlessly. "I must also ask you to withhold any promise until you have heard what I have done." She tottered forward, limping terribly on one foot that looked swelled in her stockings to twice its size. He caught her arm to steady her as she tripped on the flat surface and nearly fell. Her closeness brought with it a strong scent of sweat that was somehow pleasant.

She flinched, but then smiled up at him. "Thank you."

Darcy looked down at his hand on her soft yet strong arm. Beneath his fingers was a mottled blue and black handprint.

He let her go with a hard breath. Despite the rage that flooded him, Darcy kept his voice quiet and soft. "Who did this to you? I swear I shall call him out and kill him."

"That shall be impossible."

"I care not who the man is. The king himself, I would call out — do you wish to protect this man? I care not who he is."

Elizabeth smiled in her humorless manner again. "The trouble is, that I believe I have already placed this gentleman on my credit, and so he cannot go onto yours."

"What do you mean?" Darcy stepped closer to her. Her cheeks were flushed, her hand felt hot. "What happened? Tell me everything, and above all, tell me how I might help you."

"May I sit?" Without waiting for his reply, Elizabeth hobbled back with his arm supporting her to the chair by the crackling fire piled high at Mrs. North's command, and she collapsed into it. "I believe — had no chance for me to confirm — I believe I killed the Earl of Lachglass when he tried to… to…"

"You need not say it."

"He did not succeed." Her wide eyes looked at him beseechingly.

Lord Lechery — that was how Lachglass was known amongst the men of the ton. And Elizabeth had killed him. Lachglass was almost a relation, as he was the cousin of his Fitzwilliam cousins, on their mother's side.

"It would not have made a whit of difference to me, not in the slightest, if he had succeeded in his vile design against you."

Elizabeth smiled at him, with something of the generous sparkle he remembered better and better from the time of their acquaintance those many years before. "I am glad to hear that you are so minded. For my part, I am glad that since I did kill him, I did so before he achieved his aim. Better to be hung a maiden."

"I shall not let them hang you. I swear to that." Of course Elizabeth, brave and strong Elizabeth, had defended herself. "Is there any chance they do not know it was you?"

"None at all. I met his man of business, and smashed his cheek in as I fled the house."

"You did!" Darcy looked at her admiringly. "Shall I need to fear for myself in your presence?"

Elizabeth smiled back at him almost mischievously, though it did not reach her eyes. He could see that she wished to maintain as light a mood in her distress as she could. "You perhaps ought."

"Mr. Blight." Darcy blinked at this detail. He'd met Lechery's servant several times, and thought he was as thoroughly distasteful as his master. "Tell me all details — is there any chance they know you are come here?"

"I doubt there is. We seem to be entirely unconnected. In a way we are entirely unconnected—"

"Nay, say it not. Madam, we always have been connected, even when we did not feel the binding."

Elizabeth replied with a weak watery smile. She forced that smile. "I am glad… glad you do not despise my face. I always, always hated to think that you though ill of me, even though I deserved for you to think terribly of me."

"Never — there was nothing you said to me then that I did not deserve, and the memory of the reproof you gave me has been most valuable to me over the years, in reminding me to show less of arrogance and more of kindness to those around me."

"I am glad to see you once more," Elizabeth replied with a pale smile, "and I am also glad you do not despise me for breaking all notions of propriety to renew the acquaintance in such a manner as I have, I am—" Elizabeth paused, and she seemed to pant. She shivered, though it was almost too warm in the room, and sweat stood upon her forehead.

She added, her hand trembling slightly, "It would have been greatly to my preference to not have obliged a peer of the realm to take up permanent residence in a much smaller plot of land than he is used to. On account of the fear that they shall oblige me likewise to take up a similar residence."

"I tell you, I shall not let you be hung."

"If I must, I'll walk the gallows walk, and I'll walk that walk brave as any man. He was such a man, such a man as deserved such a fate."

"How did you end up in a position of vulnerability to Lechery? I mean Lachglass."

"Lechery?" Elizabeth laughed with real humor. "Had I known his true title, I may have exercised more caution in accepting the post of governess in his house. But I had never even met the gentleman till I was one week into dealing with his unenthusiastic daughter."

"I understand," Darcy replied, not greatly surprised. He had known that the resources of her family were slender, and a fall from gentility of this sort was hardly unexpected or unusual. "I am sorry for your loss."

"How do you know my father has not thrown me off for some strange reason?"

"It would have been a difficult matter in such a case to find respectable employment."

"As the matter turned out," Elizabeth laughed, "I did not find respectable employment."

When Darcy smiled back at her, she touched her forehead.

Her face and forehead was flushed, and it had become redder, he realized in the past minutes as they talked. "I feel queer, of a sudden," she said in a tinny voice. "And quite dizzy."

And then before Darcy's terrified gaze, her eyes rolled up into her forehead, and she slumped into the chair in a dead faint.

Darcy anxiously jumped forward and felt her forehead.

She was burning up with fever, but at least he felt her thin reedy pulse pumping blood through her precious body.

With a leap, Darcy rang for his servants, pulling the bell rope connected to the servant's quarters again and again until Mrs. North followed by a maid and a footman bustled into the room. "A doctor, for Miss Bennet. Immediately. Immediately. The physician immediately."


End file.
